A multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) communication system employs multiple transmit antennas and multiple receive antennas for data transmission. A MIMO channel formed by the transmit and receive antennas may be decomposed into independent channels, wherein each channel is a spatial subchannel (or a transmission channel) of the MIMO channel and corresponds to a dimension. The MIMO system can provide improved performance (e.g., increased transmission capacity) if the additional dimensionalities created by the multiple transmit and receive antennas are utilized.
As a solution to the high capacity requirement of future wireless systems, a lot of attention has been drawn to MIMO wireless systems. One possible transmission scenario is to transmit different data streams in parallel simultaneously. In this case, all transmitted streams experience different channel signature, and are received overlapped at the receiver antennas. Therefore, the receiver needs to perform multi-signal detection. In terms of performance, the maximum likelihood bit metric detection is the optimal. However, the computational complexity goes exponentially with respect to constellation size and the number of transmitter antennas.
There is, therefore, a need for a suboptimal approach which first detects the symbol using linear detector, followed by a soft posterior probability (APP) processing.